From a marketing perspective, Affiliate Marketing is a strategic program where a company pays other people (for example, bloggers or website owners) a commission for promoting or advertising their product or services. From the affiliate’s perspective, Affiliate Marketing is a way to earn commissions for promoting or advertising someone else’s product or service. The affiliate does not invoice, collect money, stock product or ship it. All the affiliate needs to do is get someone to follow a link from their website to the company’s website and place an order.
The Affiliate Marketing Concept
Here is how that works.
The affiliate – you – create a “niche” website. A niche is a specialized segment of the market for a specific kind of product or service. You create and publish authoritative content in this niche. Internet search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo and others) crawl your website and index it.
Someone searches for information in your chosen niche finds your website in the list of search results. They visit your website, and because of the content you have created they click on a link that takes them to a product seller or service provider, where they make a purchase. The seller knows they came from your website, and pays you a commission.
The process is pretty simple and almost automatic. You prepare the customer to purchase a product or service, point them to where they can get it, and let them complete the transaction with the seller.
Learning Affiliate Marketing
And while it is a simple process, it is not an easy one. To do Affiliate Marketing right, you need to learn from those who have been successful at it – like those at Wealthy Affiliate. Joining Wealthy Affiliate gives you access to the training you need to successfully build your online business. I say “gives you access” because it is up to you go through the training and learn.
You can try it for free, look around at the opportunities, and even take the first five lessons of the Online Entrepreneur Certification course. In those first five lessons, you will build your website. If you decide to continue, the next lessons will lead you through getting it set up for the search engines to find you. Then you start filling it with quality content.
Let’s be clear, you aren’t going to go very far for free. Running a business requires some investment. But you can get your feet wet, have some hands-on experience, and then decide if it is right for you – all at no cost and with no obligation to continue.
Choosing an Affiliate Marketing Niche
You can’t be an expert at everything. So, if your website covers too broad a range of topics, your status as an authority will be diluted. Narrow it down. And instead of being seen as one of a lot of fish in the sea, strive to become the big fish in a small pond.
The Wealthy Affiliate free Online Entrepreneur Certification course walks you through the process of choosing a niche. Then you can begin adding content suitable for your niche. Your content should be written around keywords that search engines will pick up when they crawl your website.
The Online Entrepreneur Certification course helps you understand keywords – how to choose them and how to use them in your content. Quality content is what gets you ranked in the search engines, and that is what brings visitors to your website. And visitors to your website are who click on your affiliate links resulting in commissions earned.
How Much Can You Earn?
We’re talking about commission here, so what can you reasonably expect? Like any commissioned job, it will depend on the effort you put into it. Let’s run some numbers.
If your goal is to make $100,000 per year, that’s $8,333 per month. The internet is open 24/7, so if we consider a month as 30 days you need to make about $278 per day. Here is how it breaks down for other income levels:
| Annual | Monthly | Daily |
|---|---|---|
| $100,000 | $8,333 | $278 |
| $60,000 | $5,000 | $167 |
| $24,000 | $2,000 | $67 |
Affiliate program commissions vary widely. For example, products on Amazon might give you 3% to 4%. Some specialty product sellers might give you 8%-10%. Digital products might offer as much as 50%-75%. So let’s say your niche is gourmet coffee, you find an affiliate program that pays 8% commission, and your average sale is $60. That makes your commission $4.80 on each sale. How many referral sales will that require?
| Annual | Monthly | Daily | Daily Sales Required | Number of Daily Sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $100K | $8,333 | $278 | $3,475 | 58 |
| $60K | $5,000 | $167 | $2,088 | 35 |
| $24K | $2,000 | $67 | $838 | 14 |
So for you to reach $100,000 in income, you will need to generate 58 referral sales averaging $60 each every day. And if you have a 5% conversion rate (that is very generous) it means you need 1,160 people every day reading your posts and clicking on your links.
Expanding Your Reach
Now let’s consider what happens if your content also leads people to purchase equipment and supplies – maybe a coffee maker, or filters, or possibly books about coffee. We’ll go to Amazon for that.
If your content includes a review of the top three coffee makers, let’s say from that review you are able to get 30 people every day to click your link and look at coffee makers, leading to one purchase each day (that’s about a 3% conversion rate). The average price is $120 and you earn 4% commission at Amazon. So that means you get $4.80 for each coffee maker ordered; in this example, it is the same as one order of coffee.
Now, the nice thing about Amazon is that the entire cart earns you commission. So if someone buys a $120 coffee maker and also a package of filters, a mug, and a pair of tennis shoes, you earn on all of them.
To do this you will need to have a lot of good quality content and you will need to rank on the first page of the Google search results for your keyword. Can you do it? Yes, you can, but it takes work. It also takes time to get that content out there and get it recognized by Google. This is not a “Get Rich Quick” scheme.
It does take effort, and you will need to make a commitment and stick to it. But you can do it at the pace you choose and at the times you choose.
Affiliate Programs
There are many places to go to find affiliate programs. Probably the easiest and most well-known is Amazon. The affiliate fees (commissions) earned are relatively low compared to a lot of other options, but Amazon has just about everything.
Some companies have their own affiliate programs. Usually if this is the case you can find a link in the fine print at the bottom of their website where they put privacy information and contact links. If you deal with a single company, keep in mind they may have a threshold for payment that could take you some time to meet.
Many companies operate through Affiliate Networks – for example, Rakuten Advertizing, CJ Affiliates, and ShareASale to name a few. These networks represent multiple companies. Each individual company approves your participation, but you have a single place to go for affiliate links, combined payouts, and general support. Want to see some of the companies at ShareASale? Click the banner below.
My Recommendation To You
If you’ve read this far, you likely have at least some interest. Go to Wealthy Affiliate, sign up for a free account and create a profile (you don’t have to get too personal). Dive right into the Online Entrepreneur Certification training. You get the first five lessons as part of your free membership. In this training, absorb everything you can. Create a throw-away practice website on the free Siterubix domain.
Now evaluate whether or not this might be for you. If you think maybe it is, try the Premium membership for one month. Now you have access to all of the Premium training. Go and look up the 14-day case study called Research to Profits Step-By-Step. It consists of 14 video lessons recorded live in which Jay, the Wealthy Affiliate Live Training Coach, starts from scratch researching a niche and develops a real Affiliate Marketing website. Now use this training to set up your own real website. Watch these videos at your own pace – you could do 2 or 3 a day, or you could take the entire month.
At the end of your first month, you will have a pretty good idea if this is something you want to continue. If you do – great! If you don’t, then cancel and you have no further obligation. You could even take what you’ve learned and go somewhere else, like maybe Namecheap. It’s great, inexpensive hosting but doesn’t have the training. But you’ve already learned the basics in your first month at Wealthy Affiliate.
Is It Really Worth The Effort?
Obviously I’ve found this worthwhile. You are on one of my WA hosted sites right now. So are you ready? Why not give it a shot?
One final note – if this really is for you, Wealthy Affiliate runs a big Black Friday Sale every year right after Thanksgiving. It’s a really good price and once you take advantage of it, you are locked in at that discounted price for life (that’s what I did.) Whatever you have paid for your current membership is pro-rated, so you don’t lose anything. Check out WA now so that you know whether or not you want to jump on this deal when it becomes available.